


The Place Where They Have to Take You In

by igrockspock



Category: Madam Secretary
Genre: Backstory, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, First Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21854866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: Henry builds a home for Elizabeth.
Relationships: Elizabeth McCord/Henry McCord
Comments: 34
Kudos: 89
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Place Where They Have to Take You In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mangledgutspretending](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangledgutspretending/gifts).



> Hello mangledgutspretending! I loved your prompts about domestic scenes and characters comforting each other, and I really enjoyed writing this story. I hope you enjoy reading it as well!

By the fifth time Henry’s slept over in Elizabeth’s little studio apartment, he knows three things: eggs are the only thing she knows how to cook, she leaves her dishes in the sink, and she doesn’t believe that cleaning the skillet -- or anything else -- is a priority.

He knows that because the dirty skillet from Wednesday morning is still on the stovetop Thursday night.

He also knows that he’s lucky to get to sleep over here two nights in a row, and he’s not about to wreck that by saying something about a skillet. If it bothers him that much, he ought to wash it. Nobody ever shot a man for doing the dishes, after all.

But he draws the line when Elizabeth absent-mindedly leaves the dirty breakfast dishes in _his_ sink. So maybe he’s a little over-the-top where cleanliness is concerned. The Marines will do that to a guy.

Still, he tries to play it cool. 

Elizabeth’s sitting on his couch, tying up her sneakers. She watches him stare disconsolately at the sink and a grin spreads across her face. “I’ll get it after I run,” she says, smacking him playfully on her way out the door. “If I had any idea you were such a neat freak, we probably wouldn’t have made it this long!”

Henry knows the way his family did things is not the objective reality of all families everywhere, and if he only wants to date people who abide by military standards of cleanliness, he’s going to be single for a _long_ time. So what he means to say is, “great thanks!”

What he actually says is, “Were you raised by wolves?”

Elizabeth pulls back, one eyebrow cocked. Her _did you just say that_ face rivals some drill instructors Henry has known. He’s already opening his mouth, ready to say something conciliatory about how if this is going to be a regular thing -- and he really, really hopes that it is -- they should talk about how to share space gracefully.

But he’s too late. Elizabeth’s face has gone dark in a way that he’s never seen before, like a screen came down behind her eyes. He knows then that he fucked up, really fucked up, hit some sore spot he didn’t know existed, but by then she’s already out the door.

***

She lets him into her apartment, which Henry supposes is a good sign. He’s fumbling for what to say when his gaze lands on the row of family snapshots on the window sill. He’s seen them before, on his other visits, but for the first time he notices they’re frozen in time. There’s not one photo where Elizabeth looks more than about fourteen years old.

“They died when I was fifteen,” she says, following his gaze. Her voice is steady, but her fist is clenched tight. “Car accident.”

Henry gets out the first, reflexive syllable of _I’m sorry_ before she cuts him off with a sharp shake of her head.

“ _Don’t_ say you’re sorry. I’m so tired of hearing that people are sorry.”

“Can I say I’m sorry I was a dick about the dishes?”

Elizabeth laughs, a little. Not enough to lose that guarded look in her eyes. “You weren’t a dick. Well, okay, you were a dick. But so was I.” She lets out a long sigh. “I went to boarding school after they… Anyway, I didn’t learn how you’re supposed to do things. Clean up. Whatever.”

Henry can’t think of anything to do except hold out his arms and say, “I’ll do all the dishes.”

She’s not really looking at him, or at anything else. Just staring up at the ceiling, and her eyes look wet, although he’s not really close enough to say for sure. He probably looks like an ass, standing there with his arms open, but if she doesn’t want him to _say_ that he’s sorry her parents died, he can only _show_ that he’s sorry, pride be damned.

And then suddenly Elizabeth crashes into him. Her head is on his chest, and slowly, he wraps his arms around her. When she doesn’t run, he rests his chin on her the top of her head, and then she tightens her arms around his waist.

“I usually leave before…” Her voice is small and shaky. “Before anyone gets close enough to figure out…”

Henry raises a hand to cup the back of her head. “That sounds lonely.”

“I get tired.” She pulls back to look him in the eye. “Of explaining. Of being different. Of not knowing all the things your parents are supposed to teach you before you grow up.” 

“I’m glad you told me.” He wants to say that she can trust him, but words are cheap and trust has to be earned and proved. She tucks her face against his chest again, and he brings his hand up to cup the back of her head, running his fingers slowly through her hair. He hopes she can hear what he’s saying: he’s not afraid of messy, he can handle these feelings, and above all, he’s not running away.

“Why are you being this nice to me?” she asks, her head still tucked against him.  
He leans in so he can whisper in her ear. “Because you let me.”

***

Henry can’t say how much time has passed when she finally does pull away. Her eyes are red, but she’s got an appraising look that Henry’s seen before.

“For the record, you’re kind of extreme about the whole cleaning thing, right?”

“You know they won’t let you even touch a fighter jet till you can fold a handkerchief into a 3 ½ by 4 ½ rectangle without a ruler?” he volunteers. Top Gun is a lie; flight training is mostly about cranking out whole squadrons of very obedient nerds.

For the first time today, Elizabeth smiles - the real, radiant one he’s used to. “Seriously? That’s a qualification for flying a fighter jet?”

“There’s rules for folding your socks and underwear too.” This, at least, is an easy conversation, one he’s had with the not inconsiderable number of women who find his profession attractive. Elizabeth, who is apparently friends with Arab royalty, is less dazzled than most, a fact that he finds both appealing and daunting.

“So when somebody leaves a dish in the sink for an hour --”

“I think a really angry man is going to take me off flight duty and make me do push-ups in the rain.”

“That really happens? Like a movie?”

“ _Worse_ than a movie.” 

“Huh.” Elizabeth can pack more wonder into that one syllable than anyone Henry’s ever met. It’s one of his favorite things about her, how she’s always searching for new tidbits of information and filing them away. Adding to her collection always makes him feel triumphant.

“Can I?” he asks, inclining his head toward the sink. It’s not exactly overflowing, considering Elizabeth’s penchant for dining on PBJs and microwave popcorn, but it still makes him twitchy. Might as well not hide his quirks; if this relationship goes where he wants it to, Elizabeth’s going to see them sooner or later anyway. “It’s not just the Marines. It’s my mom,” he adds when he’s up to his elbows in soapy water. “With four kids in the house, if even one of us started leaving dirty plates in the sink for a couple hours --”

“It would be a disaster by noon?” Elizabeth supplies. She’s been standing beside him, drying the plates he’s cleaned, and it’s the most domestic thing they’ve ever done together. “You know, a lot of people, when they hear what happened to my parents, they just stop talking about their families. Like they should feel guilty for having parents or something.”

Henry bites back the reflexive _I’m sorry._

“Those people are stupid,” he settles for instead. The dishes are done now -- it barely takes five minutes, which is another excellent reason _not_ to leave them mouldering in the sink -- and he borrows a corner of Elizabeth’s towel to dry his own hands.

“Hey, did we have an argument and make up?” she asks. They’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder now, legs brushing together occasionally, fingers meeting underneath the shared dish towel.

“I think we did. Does that mean I get an upgrade from guy you’re casually dating?”

Elizabeth shrugs. “Maybe. Depends on what you can do with a vacuum.”

***

Elizabeth isn’t totally forthcoming about her life, at least not right away, but Henry pieces together the broad strokes quickly enough. Her grandparents were kind but distant, ill-equipped to make a second go at parenting while processing their own grief. And they’d been old and frail before the accident happened, so Elizabeth wasn’t surprised when they died between her high school graduation and freshman year of college. The matter-of-fact way she recounts their deaths breaks Henry’s heart and redoubles his determination to make her a home.

Of course, he doesn’t need a psych degree to guess that she’s afraid of getting attached to people and losing them again, so making the relationship work is a lot more like adopting a stray cat than traditional forms of dating. Which is a stupid metaphor because Henry hates cats -- they’re useless and they make him sneeze -- but the point stands. He can’t just tell Elizabeth he wants to keep her forever; he has to slowly convince her that she wants to stay.

Step one is to clear out a drawer in his bureau, which is easy, because he barely owns civilian clothing. After that, he gets her a toothbrush for the bathroom, and he learns to share the toothpaste even though she wantonly squeezes from the middle of the tube.

Clearing out a shelf on his bookcase, that’s the real sacrifice, but when Elizabeth leaves his apartment, it’s usually because she needs some textbook or other. Henry figures he’s going to wind up with a small pile of her higher math books, but the first resident of the new shelf is…

“Huntington? _The Clash of Civilizations?_ Seriously?” He should probably stop now, try to sound more reasoned, but calm in the face of idiocy isn’t really his strong suit. “Tell me you don’t believe this bullshit about an inevitable culture war between Islam and the West! Islam is not some monolithic culture, and to suggest that it can be inhrently opposed to entire geogrpahic region --”

“Okay, so not that part. But you have to admit, he’s got a point. What about the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine? There’s no way that’s _not_ going to become a fault line, and then Russia’s going to try and take it back --”

“Which does not make it okay to suggest that differences in language and culture are inherently divisive, unless you’re just trying to start a war --”

“Easy McCord, I brought the other side with me too.” Elizabeth leans back in her chair and brandishes Fukuyama’s _End of History_ at him. “Now, this one says the fall of the Soviet Union will create world peace by triggering a wave of democratization. That’s obviously _too_ rosy, and you’re right the Huntington’s just fuel for the hawks in the Bush Administration. The truth’s in the middle somewhere.”

Henry slows his breathing, mollified. “This is heavy poli sci reading for a math major,” he says. The Fukuyama is almost 800 pages. 

“Yeah, I was thinking about a masters in political science,” she says with a shrug, as if switching the orientation of her entire education is no big deal. “The trick is to find a program that isn’t too based in rational choice theory. This idea that people only ever do what’s in their best interest, I don’t buy it. It means we have to live in a world without altruism, and that’s just depressing.”

“Marry me,” Henry says, only half joking.

“Ha!” Elizabeth raises her eyebrows. “It’ll take a lot better proposal than that.”

***

By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, Elizabeth’s mostly living in his apartment, even though she’s still paying the rent on hers. This strikes Henry as an unreasonable extravagance, but he’s not about to propose living together as a financial arrangement. Nevermind that _he_ could actually use the help with the rent.

His mom’s lupus is acting up again, so Dad could really use a little help with the bills -- not that he’ll _ask_ for it, but if Henry’s creative about it, he might be able to pull something off. Of course, that will mean he’ll be short on textbook funds next semester…

“Is your family the kind of family that drinks mimosas or run 5Ks on holiday mornings?”

Henry’s head snaps up from his bank statement. Elizabeth’s picked up one of his family photos from the bookshelf and she’s turning it over in her hands.

“To tell the truth, if anyone’s drinking in the morning, it’s probably a shot of whiskey in the coffee. The only one who runs is me, and it’s a hell of a lot more than a 5K, and you always go with me...so what are you really worried about?”

“Fine.” Elizabeth puts the picture down. “Are they going to like me?” 

“Uh...” Henry hesitates for a fraction of a second, which means that he’s lost the window for bullshit. His family is going to be suspicious of Elizabeth at best. “Erin’s kind of a handful, and she’s the loudest, unfortunately,” he offers, which is true without capturing his family’s inevitable resentment toward the sort of girl who could afford boarding school.

“So no then?” Elizabeth presses, never one to settle for a half truth.

He comes around the table to wrap his arms around her waist. “To tell you the truth, half the time I’m not sure if they like me.”

“What? You don’t really think that, do you?” She spins around to face him, eyes full of concern. This is his Elizabeth, always so quick to care for others, even when she fights tooth and nail against letting anyone return the favor.

He drops a head to her shoulder, then lifts it up again so he can meet her eyes. “Things changed after I went to college. It’s like they’re always waiting for me to prove I think I’m better than them.” Nevermind that sometimes his treacherous brain _does_ think that, or something like it. He hadn’t exactly supported Mo’s decision to marry her high school sweetheart the summer she turned nineteen.

Elizabeth could be a master interrogator someday, he thinks. She doesn’t say anything, but she’s rubbing little circles around his back, and that makes him keep talking, confessing things he’d never managed to say out loud.

“The military, they get. Officer candidate school, not so much. The engineering degree for undergrad made sense, but graduate school for theology… Well, I can’t say I even _tried_ to explain.” In a few short years, his family had transformed from the bedrock of his existence to a place where he couldn’t possibly feel understood -- and it’s not like his squadron is teeming with guys who want to spend their evenings studying divinity, which means his second family _also_ has no idea who he really is. 

Elizabeth is smiling up at him fondly. “You’re the nerdiest action hero in the entire world.”

He clears his throat. “It gets a little lonely sometimes, to tell the truth. Or it did, until I met you.”

“I know that feeling,” Elizabeth murmurs, leaning her forehead against his.

It occurs to him suddenly, stupidly, that in all of the work he’s done making room for Elizabeth, he’s never actually told her how badly _he_ needs her here. 

She lays a hand against the side of his face. “Henry? You okay?”

He swallows against a lump in his throat. “I’m just grateful. So much I don’t know how to say it. You make me feel like I’m home, and I wish you lived here. I’ll do all the dishes. And so long as you keep arguing with me about morality and political science, I swear I’ll get over my unreasonable feelings about how to squeeze the toothpaste.”

His head’s buried in her shoulder because he doesn’t think he can stand to look at her if she’s about to say no, but she tilts his chin up so she can look him in the eye. 

“Well, when you put it that way…” A smile’s tugging at the edge of her lips. “The answer’s definitely yes.”

He sags against her, his whole body going slack with relief. He has to ask, even though he knows the answer, even though it’s almost a joke at this point, but he’d made himself a promise that he’d do it every time she reminds him how much he wants to spend his life with her.

“Will you marry me?”

“Not yet.” She tucks her head against his chest, just like she had all those months ago in her apartment, when he’d finally figured out what made her so afraid of love. “But keep asking, okay?”

He does.


End file.
